Archives de catégorie : Fiction

ACCIDENTS NEVER HAPPEN de Penny Zang

From the author of Doll Parts comes a literary thriller partly inspired by We Have Always Lived in the Castle, injected with the gothic presence of Poe, and set against the vibrant and smoke-filled bars of the 80s.

ACCIDENTS NEVER HAPPEN
by Penny Zang
Sourcebooks Landmark, December 2026

1985. Madeline, a hard-edged twenty-something bartender in Baltimore, is still processing her father’s untimely death. Before, she and her sister, Annabel, a free-spirited party girl, lived alone in the apartment above the family bar where they spent their off-hours partying until sunrise and dreaming about their unsure futures in a smoke-filled rooms. Now, Annabel is reclusive, the neighborhood treats the family like outcasts, and Mad is struggling to make ends meet.

When a picture taken of the bar makes it look like there’s a ghost in the upstairs window, gothic obsessed tourists start to show up in droves. Desperate to keep customers coming in, Madeline and Annabel decide to embrace the publicity and make up a story that embellishes on the history of Edgar Allan Poe, who famously died in the city. But on opening night of their new venture, Annabel goes missing without a trace, and soon, strange things begin to happen not only in the bar, but in their neighborhood, and soon, Annabel isn’t the only bartender to disappear. Hoping to find the truth behind what happened to her sister, Mad finds herself confronted with the dark underbelly of a haunting Baltimore, and as she digs, she’ll come to realize that some ghost stories may turn out to be true.

Penny Zang is an English professor at Greenville Technical College and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from West Virginia University. She is the author of Doll Parts (Sourcebooks, 2025). Her other work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Louisville Review, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina with her husband and son.

I AM AGATHA de Nancy Foley

For readers of Elizabeth Strout and Sigrid Nunez, a darkly funny and moving debut novel about the unforgettable Agatha, whose devotion to a widow with dementia (and an inconvenient attachment to her daughter’s grave) sparks a radical reckoning with life, loss, and love’s aftermath.

I AM AGATHA
by Nancy Foley
Avid Reader Press, March 2026
(via Writers House)

Agatha, a bristly painter fleeing her own darkness, decamps to rural New Mexico to live the reclusive life of a small-town curmudgeon. It is there she meets Alice, a mild widow with a deepening case of dementia who keeps steady vigil at her daughter’s backyard grave. Despite Agatha’s rough edges and fierce aversion to sentimentality, she surprises herself by falling in love, and her well-worn convictions begin to upend.

As Alice’s condition worsens, Agatha hatches a plan for them to live together at her remote residence at Mesa Portales. But when Alice’s wayward son comes along with different ideas—and Alice suddenly goes missing—Agatha takes matters into her own hands with the help of a faithful thirteen-year-old-neighbor, a pair of shovels, and her trusty pickup, embarking on an unusual mission that calls into question whether some secrets are better kept buried.

Sharp, watchful, at once thrillingly perceptive and hidden from herself, Agatha is as imposing as the vast landscape her rustic adobe home overlooks. Loosely inspired by the life of Agnes Martin, I AM AGATHA introduces us to this irascible, indelible character who learns—over a stretch of strange, singular days—new ways to fathom life, death, and her own heart.

Nancy Foley grew up in New Mexico. She has been a writer in residence at Hedgebrook, and divides her time between New Mexico and Oregon. I AM AGATHA is her first novel.

TENDERNESS de Rowan Beaird

From the beloved author of The Divorcées comes a novel set in the 1970s during an island wedding, where the bride has recently left a sinister cult that might still be trailing her.

TENDERNESS
by Rowan Beaird
Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, July 2026

On a remote island off the coast of Virginia, family and friends gather to celebrate the wedding of Shay O’Connor and Andrew Pruitt. From the moment the guests arrive, all they can whisper about is the bride, who recently left the headline-making cult Synanon. Why would someone like Shay, an Ivy League graduate with a wealthy, doting fiancée, join Synanon? And has she really escaped their grasp?

Told from the interwoven perspectives of Shay’s brother William, her longtime friend Joel, and Shay herself, Tenderness is a slow-burn mystery that excavates dark family histories and romantic regrets. As the wedding day approaches, Joel and William pull at the loose threads of Shay’s story, and it becomes clear there is an even greater threat on the island than the secrets each character is keeping from one another.

Set in the tinderbox of the 1970s, Tenderness is a lit match, bringing hidden truths to light and asking if we can ever see ourselves or the people we love for who they truly are.

Rowan Beaird’s fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter. She is the author of the acclaimed novel The Divorcées (Flatiron, 2024).

THE FOUND OBJECT SOCIETY de Michelle Maryk

An atmospheric speculative suspense novel following a mysterious society offering its members the chance to relive the death of another person—and the self-destructive woman determined to uncover its secrets. This ambitious, genre-bending debut is perfect for fans of time-travel fiction including Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library and Gareth Brown’s The Book of Doors.

THE FOUND OBJECT SOCIETY
by Michelle Maryk
Hyperion Avenue, February 2026
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights))

For twenty years, Greta Davenport has lived with the guilt of surviving the accident that killed her parents. She’s tested the limits of her own mortality ever since, but little gives her the dopamine rush she craves. Not until the night she almost drunkenly crashes her car into a tree, and a peculiar blank card slides under her front door—an invitation to the Found Object Society. What she discovers there is beyond comprehension: an opulent, subterranean playground filled with aisles of objects from different eras and regions of the world. Pick an object and go on a voyage to relive the final moments of the person who died holding it, along with an unparalleled, irreplicable high. Greta’s hooked, but she can’t quiet her questions about the society and its enigmatic creators, the answers to which have implications far beyond her growing dependence on the voyages. Death is addictive, and what she uncovers will put her entire life into question.

A fever dream of a novel with episodic, time-traveling chapters told from multiple points of view, The Found Object Society examines the depraved whims of the ultrarich and the breadth of unresolved trauma—all while asking how grief and the choices we make in its aftermath can change the course of our lives. Michelle Maryk’s wholly original and ambitious debut opens an impeccably wrought speculative world of greed, power, and destiny.

“The Found Object Society is a mind-bendingly brilliant exploration of the nature of grief, the seductions of liminal experiences, and how alternate reality can renew, deepen, and destroy us. Addictive and beautifully rendered . . . Michelle Maryk has written one hell of a novel.” —Danielle Trussoni, New York Times bestselling author of The Puzzle Master

Michelle Maryk graduated from Cornell University with a degree in English and attended the Yale Writer’s Workshop. For the better part of twenty-five years, she’s been a successful voiceover, on-camera commercial, and comedic actor, and she is a dual Swedish and US citizen. THE FOUND OBJECT SOCIETY is her debut novel.

GHALEN de Walter Mosley

A stellar addition to the Amistad list: a beautiful coming-of-age novel from MWA Grand Master and PEN and Edgar Award-winner Walter Mosley that explores love in all forms—romantic, familial, and platonic, centered on one Black family, including a neurodivergent man, and the found bonds that helps ground them.

GHALEN: A Romance in Black
by Walter Mosley
Amistad/HarperCollins, May 2026

One of the most acclaimed writers working today, Walter Mosley spins magic once again in this beautiful novel that explores the lives of Black characters and one remarkable family through a lens both universal and unique. It touches on the lives of those whose deepest thoughts and motivations are seldom explored—including the neurodivergent, the incarcerated, and the immigrant tortured by their past—characters who will stay with you and change how you see the world.

Ghalen, a brilliant young Black man, is the son of two seemingly mismatched parents. His mother, a gifted scientist, whose own mother expected her to exceed all the achievements in her family, and his father, a gentle cook at a small vegetarian restaurant, whose idiosyncratic nature shows the young woman a radically different love and understanding of life, despite his inexperience and lack of education.

His parents’ grand love story starts it all off, setting us up to follow Ghalen and his family so deeply, that each new twist and turn feels personal.

The journey through Ghalen’s coming-of-age tale, as he ventures out into the world, is marked with peaks and valleys and such a drive that you can’t help but strap in for it all, while not wanting it to end.

Lush and cinematic, with the narrative drive and indelible power of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead andPaul Murray’s The Bee Sting, Ghalen is one of this bestselling, prize-winning writer’s finest achievements.

Walter Mosley is one of America’s most celebrated writers. He was given the 2020 National Book Award’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and honored with the Anisfield-Wolf Award, a Grammy, a PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, the Robert Kirsch Award, numerous Edgars and several NAACP Image Awards. He is the author of more than sixty critically acclaimed books that cover a wide range of ideas, genres, and forms including fiction (literary, mystery, and science fiction), political monographs, writing guides including Elements of Fiction, a memoir in paintings, and the young adult novel 47. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages. He has published fiction and nonfiction in The New Yorker, Playboy, and The Nation. As an executive producer, he adapted his novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, for AppleTV+ and serves as a writer and executive producer for FX’s Snowfall.

In 2020 he was a recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and from the National Book Foundation. In 2013, he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, and he is the winner of numerous awards, including an Edgar Award, an O. Henry Award, the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, a Grammy Award, and several NAACP Image Awards. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages.